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I have been happy with Apple Music so far. I went into it with some hesitation because (a) it was an Apple cloud service and those haven’t been solid at launch historically and (b) I was happy with Rdio as a streaming music service.

After using Apple’s offering for a while, I was confident enough that it would work for me and ended up taking a leap and canceled my long-standing Rdio account. I haven’t regretted it.

Apple Music’s “For You” section has been fantastic and I have been impressed by the well-curated playlists. After uploading the rest of my local music collection (about 19,000 songs)1, it is now available for streaming to all of my devices which has been working out really well for me as well. As a result, I have been re-discovering music that has been sitting on unplugged hard drives for years. The waltz down music-memory lane has been fun.

While I have seen some of the infrequent issues encountered by others2, these are things I have experienced before with other streaming services. They aren’t perfect. I admit it has been interesting watching my Twitter stream when there’s a temporary outage. It is like the internet has never actually used something on the internet before. With so many ways for things to break, interruptions happen. It doesn’t mean I am happy about it but I am certainly not surprised when it happens and never so frustrated by a minutes-long outage that I want to stop using the service and return to the dark days of syncing music to my phone again.

Jim Dalrymple wrote an article a few days ago skewering the service and leaving a very frustrated “goodbye” note to Apple Music for his readers to mull over. I read it and wasn’t too surprised by what I found there. It is no surprise that he is frustrated about losing 4800 songs but I find myself befuddled as to why he wouldn’t have backed up his music collection before uploading his entire collection into a 1.0 Apple cloud product having used 1.0 Apple products before (let alone their iffy cloud offerings).

Also, Jim’s music collection was the years-long creation of a music fanatic who had a lot of strange cuts, alternative versions of songs etc (with nearly-identical metadata no doubt) and spanning multiple albums. I don’t think this is going to be the case for 99% of the music listeners out there. Dalrymple, of all people, should know that Apple’s focus is on the mainstream use case. Being on the fringe as an Apple user can sometimes be a frustrating experience. Should Apple’s offerings serve niche users? Sure, but not for v1.0.

The takeaway here is more of a cautionary tale – if you have an extensive hair metal collection and four versions of the same Bob Dylan song, Apple Music might not deliver the best out-of-the-box experience.

I have some very eclectic music tastes however and Apple music still seems to serve my needs just fine. I am not alone either. Jonathan Poritsky, over at Candler Blog, wrote a great piece which really resonated. Go read that for a different take that is far different from Dalrymple’s.

I just want to put it out there that Apple Music is the best streaming service I have ever used. My guess is that there are a lot of people out there who have used it without any issues. But that’s not much of a story.

Samsung phones have been bogged-down with bloatware for as long as they’ve been around, but a Chinese consumer protection group is doing more than just complain about it — by suing Samsung and another Chinese vendor, Oppo, for loading their phones with literally dozens of pre-installed apps which are impossible to delete.

While its profits may be falling on the back of weak smartphone sales, it’s not all bad news for Samsung. The South Korean company has been named the most reputable company in the U.S. technology industry in the Reputation Institute’s latest RepTrak report.

Samsung beat out all of its biggest competitors in 2015, including arch rival Apple, which didn’t even come close. The Cupertino company now sits in 21st place in the technology industry rankings, but fell from 57th place overall last year out of the top 100 companies in 2015.

I don’t really care about the rah-rah element around tech companies at this point but I have always viewed Samsung as a bad joke given that they skirt the legal edges of aping competitor products and software and present themselves with a generally ham-fisted “me too” approach to their business.

What I find surprising is that tech “news” sites can dump these dissonant messages to readers as a form of random idea soup. Reading about research like this doesn’t provide useful information. Meanwhile, RSS readers and Twitter feeds fill with time-wasting garbage and is largely why I’ve been brutally culling sites like this out of my feed-reader lately.

“Cluttered house, cluttered mind” is something I used to tell myself. I had this false image that I was pretty good at staying on top of being a mess but then I looked around my house and saw a stack of dusty place-mats sitting on a side table that my brain had been editing out of my field of view for weeks and decided the whole topic needed to be reconsidered.

I moved aside the opened Amazon box that had been sitting on my dining room table for an undetermined amount of time so I could open my Field Notes and started scrawling some show notes…

As the weeks go on, I am reaching an interesting place with the Apple Watch. Here’s an update.

Glances

One of the ways I have made it more useful is by winnowing out the number of Glances. Right now I use four. I keep a few at the tail end of the available selections but I rarely use them. Here is my current rotation.

They are all well-designed and, although three of them are slow to refresh (it is hardly their fault since they are hobbled third-party apps but I still find it annoying for now), the information they provide is something that I regularly used my phone for and they serve a useful purpose on the watch.

Fantastical’s “day map” timeline is a really nice view of your day at a glance (ha!) and Flexibits has wisely added the ability to toggle what gets sent over to the watch. I find it very well thought out. By turning off reminders, I don’t see them cluttering up my list of meetings and appointments. I don’t go to my watch to check off a reminder; I just want to see what’s happening next and anything beyond that is clutter.

PCalc’s Glance is something I originally though was a throwaway feature but, after using it for a week, it makes a lot of sense. It shows you the last two numbers you calculated (from the Watch and the iPhone) – that is all. While it may sound too sparse to be useful, having your last calculation result available with a flick of the wrist is really excellent thinking. It saves some short term memory registers in my aging brain and if I need to get to the calculator, a quick tap will take me there. Very smart.

I have been a huge fan of DarkSky’s hyperlocal weather and still use it on my phone (and I still have it installed on my Apple Watch) but WeatherUnderground’s Apple Watch Glance is my current favorite. It is a well thought-out Glance with the high temp/low temp/current conditions for your immediate location with the current temperature and an abbreviated hourly forecast on the bottom. Clean and informative.

ETA’s Glance is terrific. ETA is an app that will give you an estimated time of arrival for locations of your choice. The latest version gives you traffic conditions (for what it determines is your likely road choices). The Glance will display the last-viewed ETA which is exactly what you want when you tilt your wrist.

While I do use the Watch for Activity Monitoring and the motivational stuff, the iPhone app has more information and I usually check my progress when I have a quiet moment (thus it seems more suited to the iPhone to me).

Watch Faces

I only have three watch faces in my list and they all suit a particular purpose.

Utility face with an orange second hand for the weekend

Utility face with a green second hand for work

Simple face with nothing but analog time and date number

I really like the Utility face in general and I have the different second hand colors to quickly suss out which view I am in. One of the faces is focused on work-related needs (date, sunrise/sunset, meeting reminders, activity) and the other less work-focused (date, sunrise/sunset, Hong Kong time, activity). The Simple face is for when I’d like a more stripped down, classic look.

I have been playing around with complications and like how you can tune them to to suit your needs. I never thought sunrise/sunset times would be useful but with my current push to get fit, having those times on my wrist lets me easily find time windows to fit my bike rides in throughout the day. As I mentioned above, I don’t want to delve into my activity details on my watch but having a little graph indicating where I’ve been slacking off is great.

The bottom line is they are very personal and are so easily changed that I find I don’t really worry all that much about locking down “how I use my Apple Watch from here on out”. My whole approach to the Watch has become more fluid and dynamic. If I need another watch face to serve a specific purpose, a new view can be set up in seconds and I can swap to it with a push of my finger. With familiarity comes a host of new ways to think about how to fit the watch into your day.

Note that I have removed the battery indicator from the watch face or my Glances. I rarely go to bed with less than 45% battery and seeing that every time I looked at my watch was wasted space.

Notifications

I get very few notifications on my watch.

Calender reminders

Message notifications

Twitter replies

Lead changes in the Phillies and Mets games

Calendar reminders are a no-brainer. Having them thump my wrist and show me where I’m going next is very helpful throughout the day.

Message notifications are also useful. For extremely chatty conversations, I set them to “Do Not Disturb” on the iPhone and check them when I have time. Generally they don’t contain time-sensitive messages so that works out.

Twitter replies are helpful and I find Twitterific does a great job of keeping me informed of any activity on Twitter that I should take a look at.

Lead changes in baseball games on your wrist using the MLB app is a pretty nice way of keeping abreast of what is happening in games when you don’t have time to listen or watch (which is, sadly, most of the time for me)

That’s it! Thinking critically about the types of helpful information I could use throughout the day has really paid off for me and it has been an interesting experiment seeing how my interaction with the Apple Watch evolves week in/week out. I am finding it a more essential piece of technology now than in week one and I can only imagine that, when native apps hit the App Store, we may find we have a very capable and powerful device on our wrist.